Just starting to document all my research on here.
Hopefully this will be soon followed by a a huge appendix of work i have not yet put up.
Dazzle Ships,
Dazzle camouflage, also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle painting, was a camouflage paint scheme used on ships, extensively during World War I and to a lesser extent in World War II. Credited to artist Norman Wilkinson, it consisted of a complex pattern of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other.
At first glance Dazzle seems unlikely camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it, but this technique was developed after the Allied Navies were unable to develop effective means to disguise ships in all weathers.
Dazzle did not conceal the ship but made it difficult for the enemy to estimate its type, size, speed and heading. The idea was to disrupt the visual rangefinders used for naval artillery. Its purpose was confusion rather than concealment.[1] An observer would find it difficult to know exactly whether the stern or the bow is in view; and it would be equally difficult to estimate whether the observed vessel is moving towards or away from the observer's position.[2]
All in information from wiki
Art history
Winston Churchill considered deception in war to be an indispensable "element of léger de main, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten."[8]
In 2007, the art of concealment was featured as the theme for a show at the Imperial War Museum. The evolution of Dazzle was re-examined in this context. Picasso is reported to have taken credit for the modern camouflage experiments which seemed to him a quintessentially Cubist technique.[9] He is reported to have drawn the connection in a conversation with Gertrude Stein shortly after he first saw a painted cannon trundling through the streets of Paris.[2]
In 2008, the Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design announced the rediscovery in its collection of 455 lithographic printed plans for the camouflage of US merchant ships during World War I. These documents were donated to the RISD library in 1919 by one of the school’s alumni, designer Maurice L. Freeman, who had been a camouflage artist for the U.S. Shipping Board in Jacksonville, Florida. Portions of the collection were publicly shown at the RISD library for the first time from January 26 through March 29, 2009, in an exhibition titled "Bedazzled."
Other links are on wiki website.
Now you see it....... now you don't. The times march 10 2007
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article1479657.ece
The use of camouflage accelerated with the arrival of the aeroplane in war. Artists, as masters of optical illusion, were called in to develop forms of disguise to stop vulnerable targets being bombed to destruction. It was the French who led the way thanks to the Cubists — even though their experiments had nothing to do with warfare. Picasso and Braque were investigating the nature of perception, and whether there might be a way of painting objects that could somehow be more rounded and more comprehensive than traditional Western perspective allowed for.
To Evaluate, the ships were camoflauged not to disguise into the back ground but make the form unrecognisable to enemies. this would not appear familiar on a horizon. I think it also relates to optical art. What optical art could i attempt? it is also thought it Dazzle comes from cubism and i feel it does closely relates.
